


my head’s getting heavy pressed against your arm

by zenstrike



Series: you’re lucky that’s what i like [22]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Anxiety, M/M, POV Lance (Voltron), and other intense emotions, hand-holding, self-indulgent romantic garbage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-04 22:42:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16798489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Keith and Lance, the day after their first date, doing their best.





	my head’s getting heavy pressed against your arm

**Author's Note:**

> originally this was the prologue of one of the 5+1s i’m working on but it took on a life of its own so...we’ll call it a prequel yes ladskfalsdkj
> 
> takes place the morning after now go when you’re ready...way back at #2 :’)

The morning after their first date, Lance stopped with his jacket half done up and his bare fingers twitching at his chest and his toes wiggling against the floor. In his bed and across the room, Keith snored. It was sweet. Lance wondered how he had never noticed it before: the little Keith snores. Maybe because Keith was up early most days. Maybe because Wednesday was one of the few non-practice days where Keith could press into his bed and just doze until a reasonable time of the day. 

Lance shuffled to the side of Keith’s bed and frowned down at him. He opened his mouth. He closed it. He could see himself reaching out and prodding Keith awake, maybe bending when Keith’s head and his wild hair emerged from under the blankets, and he could feel how easy it would be to bend and kiss Keith’s cheek and say “see you later.” 

Lance swallowed.

He turned away, scooped up his backpack, and dashed out the door before the heat in his cheeks could become overwhelming.

He thought about Keith the whole, cold way to main campus and his lab. He thought about the sound of Keith’s snores, or the way Keith looked just sitting on his bed with his books and his comfy clothes, or the way Keith had kissed him in the theatre the night before. Keith, warm next to him on the bus; and Keith, shaking the chocolates as they walked to the auditorium; and Lance, taking Keith’s hand because he wanted to, because he knew he could, because he knew— _ knew _ —that Keith wanted him to.

Lance zipped up his collar as high as it would go and hunched into his jacket and leaned into the cold winter wind and waited for the chill to cool him.

He was distracted.

Embarrassed, maybe?

Warm, from the crown of his head to the tip of his toes and all of it pooling in his stomach like nerves and butterflies and popcorn.

“It’s too cold for this,” Eli said around a yawn and by way of greeting when Lance stumbled his way to their bench. “And too dark.”

“Yeah,” Lance managed and Eli looked at him for a moment.

Lance shrugged out of his coat and dropped it on top his backpack. He rolled his shoulders. He patted his cheeks.

“What’s up?” Eli asked, his head tilting.

“Nothing,” Lance muttered and squirmed onto his stool next to their computer. “I went out last night.”

“Bad idea,” Eli sighed, and patted his shoulder.

Maybe.

_ Maybe _ .

Or—good idea. Very good idea.

Lance’s hand was halfway to his mouth before he caught himself and he tapped his chin instead, too vigorously to be casual. “No,” he said eventually as Eli hopped up onto the stool next to him. “Good.”

“Good,” Eli echoed.

“So good.”

Eli’s face scrunched into a half-laughing smile that Lance was starting to know well: like he wanted to laugh but didn’t know if he could, or like the laughter was just caught in his mouth.

Lance slapped his hands to the top of their bench and beamed at the far door.

Their TA delivered the lab assignment and Eli and Lance bent together to read it, Eli muttering to himself and Lance trying to trace each typed letter with his sleepy eyes. He half-remembered this lecture. He was halfway to calm, too, and halfway to shoving Keith out of his head for a little while.

He could make it through three hours.

And then he could make it through astro in the afternoon.

And then he could make it through waiting for Keith to come home after his afternoon bio lecture.

And then—

Lance started thinking as hard as he could about every physics formula he had ever learned.

“Lance,” Eli said, nudging him. “Hello?”

“I think I’m going to explode,” Lance said.

“Nah.” Eli shrugged and nudged him again, knocking their shoulders and elbows together and  _ of course _ that made Lance think of Keith— “It’s easier than you think.”

Lance wanted to tell him, then. He wanted to say that all he could think about this morning was how not twelve hours before he had held hands with his roommate on the bus and he had panicked his way into a good night’s rest and how Keith, with his handsome eyes and his (fine!) nice hair and the sometimes disarming intensity of his voice—well, maybe how Keith had crawled his way into the crevices of Lance’s brain and made normal thinking impossible.

Lance wanted to ask if it would be like this for their whole relationship. Intense. Consuming. Warm.

Eli was really good at small talk, Lance realized as they got to work with pencils and highlighters scattered around them and weights that Lance kept knocking over. Eli knew how to keep a one-sided conversation going: complaints about yesterday’s lecture, thoughts on the final exam, concerns about the tea shop three blocks off campus that was being eaten away by a competing brunch spot. All Lance really needed to do was nod, smile a little, twitch a bit maybe—and Eli would just keep going.

Lance thought he and Eli could be good friends, one day.

And then around 9:30, Eli stretched his arms over his head and yawned and said: “Okay, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on,” Lance said.

“Uh huh.”

“Nothing!” Lance dropped his pencil to the bench. He shrugged. He waved his arms, just a little. “Tell me about your nephew.”

“Tell me what happened last night.”

They frowned at each other.

“I went out,” Lance said. “Uh, with my roommate.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Eli considered this for a moment. “Well,” he said eventually. “That’s good. That means you guys are getting along, right?”

“Yeah,” Lance said, his mouth dry. “Yeah.”

Eli squinted at him. “Did something happen?”

Did something happen?

Yeah, a thing or two.

“Date,” Lance blurted. “It was a date.”

“ _ What _ ?”

“A good date.” He paused. “A great date.” And then he groaned and he dropped his head to the bench and he let Eli rub his back.

“That’s good,” Eli said, sounding strained.

Lance just groaned again.

They didn’t talk much after that.

Not that Eli didn’t try, but every time he said something or started to ask  _ something _ , Lance felt his face heat up and his mouth gape open and then Eli would frown at him and they would go back to math.

“Look,” Eli said when they neared the end of their report. Lance’s hands slapped against the keyboard as he typed. “We’ll go get some—donuts, okay? And we’ll go to that quiet spot near the chem building where nobody ever goes ‘cause it kind of smells like eggs, you know? And we can—talk about it.”

“Talk about  _ what _ ,” Lance grumbled, glaring at the computer screen.

“If I had a mirror I’d point it at you and make you look.”

Lance hunched and kept typing and ignored the heat crawling up his neck. Maybe this was all he was now: a blushing, twitching mess. Maybe that was a bad sign. Maybe he needed to end it before it got worse. Maybe he needed to just—

He stopped. He swallowed. The cursor blinked at him, mocking his sudden inability to—language.

Eli poked him in the side. “After! Donut! Freak out! It’ll be okay!”

Lance nodded and carried on, Eli giving him pointers or just outright dictating sentences over his shoulder. He wanted to focus. He wanted to focus on getting out of lab on time, or even early, and he wanted to focus on making sure their report was clear and good and all that stuff. But it was like the longer he was away from Keith the worse his panic got: what happened with distance, anyways?; what if Keith woke up and was already sick of him, or what if Lance saw Keith later and he wasn’t everything Lance’s memories made him out to be?

They finished a few minutes early. Eli scurried away to hand their report in and Lance put away the last of their equipment and they shrugged back into their coats.

“Donut,” Eli said. “I really want a donut.”

“I feel kind of sick.”

“Those things in your stomach are called nerves.”

“No.”

“Yeah,” Eli sighed and pushed open the door for them and the noise of the hall was suddenly very loud and very clear and Lance was suddenly aware of how much of the morning had vanished but all that was normal.

And then he saw Keith scramble to his feet and brace himself against the opposite wall, clutching his backpack and looking wide-eyed right at Lance.

“Keith,” Lance said, frozen in the doorframe.

“Hi,” Keith said.

Eli tugged Lance out of the way of one of their labmates. A clock overhead clicked a passing minute very loudly.

“I thought we could get lunch together,” Keith said.

“Oh.”

Eli was still holding Lance’s sleeve.

“Yeah.” Keith shifted uncomfortably and then loosened his hold on his backpack. His looked at Eli. “Unless you had plans—”

Eli released Lance. “Oh, no, I was just going.” He laughed, nervous and quick. “I’m Eli.”

“Hi,” Keith said again. “I’m Keith.”

“Yeah.” Eli cleared his throat. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yeah.”

“You came to see me,” Lance choked out.

Keith looked back at him and blinked once and something about Lance must have steadied him because he seemed to loosen, from his shoulders to his eyes to his lips, and he smiled. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Eli muttered. “I’m gonna—go.”

Lance had a moment of panic but Eli was gone before he could apologize or beg him to stay, gone so quick it was almost like Eli was running.

“He seems nice,” Keith said.

The door opened and another pair exited the lab, talking quietly with their heads bowed and their hands flailing.

“Yeah,” Lance said. He swallowed.

Keith looked away. He pulled his backpack on and tugged at the straps and looked at his feet and then back at Lance. “Do you want to get lunch together?”

“Yes,” Lance replied and maybe it was a little quick and a little eager but Keith’s smile grew and that felt like—sunlight in Lance’s chest, or the burst of warm adrenaline that came at the best moment of his runs, or the floating feeling that came when Keith kissed him.

“Okay,” Keith said and took one long step across the little hallway. “Let’s go.”

He took Lance’s sweaty hand just like that and they started down the hall together.

They walked, hand-in-hand and with Lance’s brain buzzing and Keith quiet next to him, through one building and then another and then through the sciences library, before Lance realized they weren’t going much of anywhere.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Keith muttered, and tugged Lance aside to let a campus tour group make their slow way through the pedway between the sciences library and the math building. “Anywhere, I guess.”

“Oh,” Lance said and looked down at their hands, their fingers twisted together. “Uh. Sorry.”

“What?”

Lance grimaced. “Sweaty.” He paused. “Nervous.”

Keith blinked at him. “Me too,” he muttered, so quiet Lance barely heard him but he squeezed Lance’s hand and Lance’s heard thud-thudded in his chest, loud and cliched and annoying but also—invigorating. “Let’s just go downstairs.”

“Huh?”

“The math cafeteria.”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“I don’t know.” Another squeeze. “They take our meal plan though.”

“It’s expensive,” Lance said.

“Fuckers,” Keith sighed, and Lance laughed and let Keith tug him along back across the pedway.

Outside, it was snowing again but the sun was out.

And Lance liked holding Keith’s hand, liked having Keith there to ground him as they pushed through the late morning crowds gathering around the two Tim Hortons in the building. People were loud. The tour carried on nearby.

“Keith—”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. Nevermind!”

The noise grew as they took the stairs down the cafeteria. Laughter, yelling, someone complaining about something. As many bags as there were people, bulky and taking up precious seats. They stepped out of the way at the bottom of the stairs and tucked themselves against a wall.

Lance could smell hamburgers.

His stomach rumbled.

They were still holding hands and Lance had forgotten, for a moment, to be self-conscious about it. He knew he was clutching Keith’s hand, holding on just a little too tight, and he knew that anyone could look at them and know that—something—was up. But Keith wasn’t letting go and hell if Lance would—

Keith was looking at him, his head tilted. Lance wanted to touch his hair. Run his fingers through it, maybe. Kiss Keith, probably.

“Food?” Keith said.

“Food,” Lance agreed.

They peeled their hands apart and Lance laughed nervously and Keith just shook his head and they ducked into one of the food service lines together.

It was only after he had his hamburger and was clutching the little compostable container and letting his mouth water that Lance remembered Eli, and their donut plans, and his planned freak out, but then he looked at Keith and watched Keith sniff his hamburger and look pleased and thought: Eli will understand.

“What?” Keith said, closing his container again.

“Nothing!” Lance whirled away and made a good show of scanning the seating area. “We’re not going to find a table, you know.”

“Let’s go back upstairs,” Keith said at Lance’s shoulder and touched Lance’s elbow.

They didn’t have much more luck upstairs. Everywhere was noisy, and crowded with fellow undergraduates shoving lunch in their faces, or with students running to and from classes and labs. Lance tried to remember everything he could from orientation, every secret study spot an older student might have mentioned.

Maybe they could just get on a bus together and see where it took them.

They didn’t talk as they walked and they weren’t holding hands anymore, but Keith stayed close and Lance wanted him closer and their elbows kept knocking and Lance felt compelled to swallow back his smile which just made his face feel twitchy. Back in the chem building, they finally found an empty bench tucked in between two labs and near a door and with regular gusts of cold wind. Lance scurried towards it and dumped his backpack on one side of the bench.

Keith followed and they sat together.

And then—nothing happened.

Lance licked his lips. He tapped his fingers against his hamburger’s box and he strained to listen to Keith breathe next to him. Someone was laughing, loud and echoing, further away. The building smelled faintly of—bananas.

What now?

Lance swallowed. He glanced at Keith and then back at his twitching hands. Was this a bad sign? That they couldn’t even have a conversation without—something? He knew that this something—the flustered, nervous, uncertain something—was mostly  _ his _ something but wasn’t Keith being quiet and shy too?

Keith opened his lunch with a pop and a crunch that startled Lance, and Lance watched him take an enormous bite of his hamburger.

Lance blinked.

Keith chewed.

“Are you a stress-eater?” Lance blurted.

Keith paused, chewed, swallowed. He licked some ketchup from the corner of his mouth and Lance’s heart flipped over in his chest. “Uh,” he said. “I guess? Isn’t everyone?”

Lance tried to cram his whole burger in his mouth.

“Are  _ you _ a stress-eater?” Keith asked.

“No,” Lance wanted to say but he was busy trying not to choke on his food.

Keith tilted his head. He frowned. “Are you stressed?”

“No,” Lance wanted to say again  _ but _ —

“Have I stressed you out?” And maybe it was alright that Lance wasn’t saying anything, because maybe it seemed like Keith was talking to himself more than to Lance in a borderline mutter as he frowned down at his burger.

And maybe Lance wanted to run. Maybe he wanted to burst out the doors and throw himself in the snow and just scream. “I’m not good at this,” he wanted to say, but his mouth was dry and full of meat and cheese and bread. “I could be better at this,” he wanted to say. “You’ve got a really nice nose,” he wanted to say.

Because Keith did have a nice nose, and warm hands. He was nice to kiss and sit next to. He was handsome clutching his hamburger and frowning so his face got all squished and grumpy. His hair was soft.

Lance visualized burying himself in snow.

“I thought it’d be nice to—” Keith broke off. He looked back up at Lance and Lance hoped—prayed, really—that he wasn’t gaping at Keith with his mouth all full of half-chewed lunch. “I wanted to see you.”

Something inside Lance lurched and tumbled and it might have been his heart and it might have been what he had managed to swallow of his burger. He tried to swallow the rest of the bite down and choked and he whirled away. Keith shoved a napkin into his flailing hands.

“Yeah,” Keith said while Lance coughed. “I stressed you out.”

He sounded, a little, like he was laughing at Lance but—he sounded sad, too. Or nervous. And the thing lurched inside Lance again and he wiped frantically at his face.

“No,” he coughed out and turned back. “No—well—yes. I mean! I was stressed out anyways.” He paused and grimaced and Keith blinked at him, waiting with his eyebrows raised. Lance swallowed. He wiped at his face one more time and looked away. “I wanted to see you, too.”

“Oh.”

Lance squirmed. “And I was kind of a twitchy mess in lab so Eli and I were going to go buy donuts and eat them and I was going to freak out in a corner with him.”

“Oh.”

“Because, you know, I’ve got a thing—or two—to freak out about!”

“Yeah?”

Lance deflated. He crumpled the napkin in his hand. “Yeah.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and then Keith leaned back against the bench and eyed the opposite wall and Lance remembered, suddenly and with so much brightness, Keith scrambling to his feet and looking at Lance with his eyes wide and cheeks a little flushed.

“Okay,” Keith said eventually. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your freak out.”

It was hard to tell, just from his tone, whether he was mad or annoyed or sad or—whatever. But he wasn’t looking at Lance, and there was  _ something _ in his voice that made Lance’s skin grow cold and his stomach flip over in the not-so-great way it did before an exam, or if he slept through his alarm, or if he missed three calls from home—

Lance closed the hamburger container and shoved it off his lap and onto the bench next to his bag. He huffed a breath and shuffled closer until their knees bumped and their elbows brushed. He squeezed the napkin and willed his hands to stop sweating.

“I’m glad you came,” he said eventually, his voice sounding a little high even to his own ears. “I’m glad you—I was thinking about you, you know.” He paused. “I thought about waking you up.”

“What?” Keith’s head jerked but he didn’t pull away.

“You know,” Lance mumbled and threw himself back against the bench. “To say goodbye.”

Keith was quiet for a moment, and then: “You should’ve.”

“No way. You’d probably—pinch me or something.”

“Probably not.” Keith shifted next to Lance. “I’d like that.”

And somehow, just with that, Lance’s heart launched into its rat-a-tat against his chest and the heat rose up his neck and into his cheeks and he stared down at his knee and tried not think about snow again. “Okay,” he muttered.

“Okay.”

Keith set aside his own lunch and Lance watched his hands, with his short nails and the almost-angle of his thumbs, and Lance thought, maybe for the first time, that he liked Keith’s hands.

He liked them a lot. He liked the idea of them, maybe, and the way Keith clutched coffee cups and highlighters and held Red, sometimes. He liked the feel of Keith’s hands on his shoulders, against the back of his neck, on his knee.

Keith’s fingers twitched. Lance swallowed. He wanted to look up, but he was stuck, now.

“I’m going to hold your hand,” Keith said, slowly. “Don’t freak out.”

“I’m cool,” Lance squeaked out. “I’m good. I’m great.”

“Oh my god,” Keith muttered but took Lance’s hand and plucked out the balled up napkin and gave Lance just a split-second to think “yuck” before he twisted their fingers together.

Lance remembered to breathe eventually.

Long breath out.

Long breath in.

He squeezed Keith’s hand and studied the shape of their hands together, their fingers linked and the way their skin seemed to melt against each other like they had been painted that way. 

“My hand’s sweaty,” Lance muttered.

“I expected that,” Keith replied, just as quiet. 

“I bet your hand’s sweatier.”

“It might be.”

That felt like permission to lean against Keith, to feel the shape of their shoulders through their coats.

“Why were you going to freak out with Eli?” Keith said, soft and quick. His hand twitched against Lance’s. “I mean—” He broke off with a small, frustrated sound that seemed to come from the back of his throat and it made Lance want to kiss him.

Push his hands into Keith’s hair and just—kiss him.

He focused on their hands. “I don’t know,” Lance said. “Last night, I guess.”

“Still?”

“What do you mean still?”

“I don’t know!” Another twitch of Keith’s hand and Lance held on instinctively, suddenly afraid that Keith was going to pull away.

But he didn’t. And they stayed like that.

“I thought you’d be happier today,” Keith said, and there was that frustrated rumble under his voice again. Lance chewed at his bottom lip, tracing the shape of Keith’s fingernails with his eyes. “I thought we had a good night.”

“We did,” Lance said quickly. “I mean, I did. I definitely—”

“Then why the freak out?”

“I just—am freaking out, okay!”

“Just—don’t.”

“Oh yeah,” Lance grumbled. “Great advice. You’re so helpful.”

“Lance,” Keith said, and it sounded a little like a summons and Lance was looking up at him before he could think better of it and there Keith was: close, and looking right back at him and all Lance could see were his eyes.

His breath was caught in a swirl in his chest, drowning out everything else and making his heart slow until it stopped and all the lunchtime noise of the day had faded and his own hunger had vanished. He thought about touching the spots under Keith’s eyes, of tracing his cheekbones and the line of jaw, of pressing his face to Keith’s neck and finding his pulse.

Lance licked his lips. “Is it not—like this for you?”

Keith frowned, his brow furrowing and his mouth twisting and heat rose and fell along Lance’s spine, like something pushing him towards Keith. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Intense. Loud.” Lance paused. “A little scary.”

“Are you scared of me?”

Lance considered this, his brain turning over his own fear slowly and cracking it open. “No.”

“Good,” Keith said, and he sounded relieved and halfway to a sigh and Lance wondered what he would see if he leaned back and pulled his hand away and just looked at Keith. Caught him in a moment and framed him forever in the back of Lance’s mind.

“I’m just scared,” Lance admitted. “I don’t know why.”

Keith blinked.

He had beautiful eyelashes. Lovely eyelids. The curve of his brow was—

Inviting, maybe.

“I was thinking about kissing you a lot,” Lance said in a rush. “I was thinking about—waking up and knowing you were across the room and wanting to wake you up just to say—” He stopped, his mouth snapping shut and his teeth clicking together almost painfully.

“‘Good morning’?” Keith suggested, and the little sound of laughter was back.

Lance grunted.

“I like you, Lance,” Keith said then, and Lance waited for the floor to open up and swallow them whole. “I like you a lot.”

“Oh.”

“And if we—keep going, or whatever, I’m going to keep liking you a lot.”

“Oh.”

Keith paused and Lance tried to remember to breathe. He knew that they were on the edge of something, he didn’t know what, but he felt Keith tugging him towards it, clutching his hand and leading the way and Lance was sure in that moment that he  _ wanted _ —

“Do you like me?” Keith asked.

“Yeah,” Lance said, almost gasped, and the universe gifted him with a perfect view of the slow shape of Keith’s smile.

“There we go,” Keith muttered and Lance wanted to say a thing or two to  _ that _ even if he didn’t know  _ what _ —and then Keith gripped the front of his jacket and pulled him in for a kiss, searing and bruising and warm.

Lance melted, a little. Waited for his skin to just fall off his bones and expose him to the world. Felt his eyelids flutter and his throat summon up the slightest of groans.

They had kissed before. Lance thought he knew what Keith’s lips felt and tasted like, thought he knew how he felt when Keith touched him and said his name so softly it might as well be a whisper.

This was different.

Loud, maybe.

Intense—yes.

And—

He pulled back but Keith held on, still close enough that Lance thought he could feel him scowl.

“Keith,” he said. “ _ Keith _ .”

“What?”

“Want to be my boyfriend?”

Keith laughed and tugged him close again and Lance sighed when Keith said: “Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from adore by amy shark
> 
> and i got 50k of this series down over nano this year but i’m still not done but HEY we’re starting a new “arc” so i hope you all like it alkjdfaldskfjalfsdkj thank you so much for every comment and every idea you’ve mentioned and every thought you’ve had and every aldkfjaslfskaj you’ve given me. it means so much to have folks come along on this journey with klance and hunk and red :’)


End file.
